It’s hard to overstate how disconcerting the news about our government has been since Obamacare debuted on October 1st.

The HealthCare.gov rollout for consumers, utterly disastrous and demoralizing as it has been, is in the grand scheme a far-down-the-list annoyance. Its most beneficial result has been to teach Americans with their eyes even remotely open that our government has devolved to the point where it can’t carry out even the simplest of tasks.

Over a long weekend followed by some supplemental tweaking, the three guys who built the working Affordable Care Act policy search web site known as TheHealthSherpa.com for free accomplished what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s assembled contractors and bureaucrats couldn’t get done with a 42-month head start and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Team Sebelius’s work has been extraordinarily shoddy. Four IT experts told a congressional hearing this week that the currently not secure web site won’t be secure by the government’s self-imposed but increasingly squishy November 30 deadline. You would think in these circumstances that no one with a brain would suggest that users visit HealthCare.gov and attempt to enroll. You would be wrong. On Wednesday, Sebelius said that she “feels like it’s safe.” She “knows” it is not. A private firm executive allowing this travesty to continue for 50 days would be in jail, and his or her company would be shut down permanently.

Behind the curtain, things are far worse. With about 25 business days left before the provision of medical services is set to begin, what remains undone is downright terrifying.

We’re told that the problem with HealthCare.gov sending bad enrollment information to insurers, first reported five weeks ago but surely discovered just days after the site’s launch, is only “two-thirds” fixed.

That’s the “good” news.

On Tuesday, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deputy chief information officer Henry Chao told a House hearing that “the back-office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems, they still need be built.” Chao had plenty of chances to correct himself, and didn’t. It’s reasonable to believe, especially based on this administration’s track record, that Chao really said that work on these systems hasn’t even started.

As awful as all of this is, what’s infinitely worse is that the administration still clings to the notion that its core guarantee — that “if you like your health care plan (and doctor, and provider), you can keep your health care plan (and doctor, and provider)” — remains true for 95 percent of Americans. It’s not.

Given one more chance to come clean with the American people on November 14th, Obama instead chose to perpetuate that myth (bolds are mine):

With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan, you can keep it, I think — and I’ve said in interviews — that there is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise. We put a grandfather clause into the law, but it was insufficient.

Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for 5 percent of the population. So when I said you can keep your health care, I’m looking at folks who’ve got employer-based health care …

Obama’s “5 percent” lowball estimate of the individual market is really eight percent. But it’s his statement about employer-based health care which officially and irretrievably takes his and his administration’s fundamental dishonesty to a new level.

Obama acted as if the projections of employer plan cancellations published in the Federal Registerin June 2010 don’t exist. They do, and their midpoint estimate is that 51 percent of employer plans will not be grandfathered (i.e., they will have been cancelled) by the time the deferred employer mandate kicks in on January 1, 2015 (the low and high estimates are 39 percent to 69 percent, respectively).

At that point, employers will be forced to assess whether they can afford to replace them with Obamacare-approved plans containing the statist scheme’s minimum coverage standards and their accompanying massive cost increases. A far from insignificant number of them will choose not to replace their plans, and will end employee healthcare coverage entirely in the name of survival.

The Obama administration had over three years to do something about what the president claimed was an “insufficient” grandfathering clause, and did nothing. That’s because, despite his contention, they actually wanted to make grandfathering difficult. They have clearly been quite successful in achieving their goal. In a recent survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, only 27 percent of respondents reported that their plans still had grandfathered status.

It further turns out that last month, during the course of arguing its case supporting the Affordable Care Act’s religious freedom-violating contraception mandate, Department of Justice lawyers gave the June 2010 Federal Register grandfathering estimates legal credibility by filing a brief which specifically referred to them.

Obama’s November 14 statement was a transparent attempt to worm out of all of this by changing what he originally said. His promise wasn’t that “you can keep your health care”; it was that “you can keep your health care plan.” That’s not going to happen, for at the very least a significant plurality if not a majority of employees — and if you can’t keep your plan, there certainly isn’t any guarantee that you will be able to keep your doctor or other medical provider under its Obamacare replacement.

This is what happens when you put breathtaking incompetence together with patented progressive “whatever it takes” dishonesty. You get the Mother of All Failed Government Program Rollouts, the Mother of All Domestic Deceptions, and the Mother of All Presidential Failures, all in one petulant, defiant, punk package.

Blogger extraordinaire Patterico, reacting to separate allegations unrelated to Obamacare that the Census Bureau fabricated household surveys which ended up “cooking” the controversial September 2012 pre-election jobs report at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the administration’s favor, summed up where we are perfectly with this bunch: “They’re not just lying about politics now. They’re lying about data. They’re lying about everything. All the time. Constantly.”

Along with having a decades-long career in accounting, finance, training and development, Tom Blumer has written for several national online publications primarily on business, economics, politics and media bias. He has had his own blog, BizzyBlog.com, since 2005, and has been a PJM contributor since 2008.

Will Obamacare be repealed or won't it? Will Congress fund it or won't it? Blah, blah, blah. We the people just need to do what we need to do and Congress be damned. Resist. Refuse. Revolt. EXEMPT OURSELVES! We did not comply with Prohibition and we simply should not comply with Obamacare. For religious reasons. For privacy reasons. For the cause of liberty and freedom and in protest of the idea that the federal government (under one party rule, no less), can force private citizens to purchase anything with our own money. Are we citizens or subjects? Mice or men(women)? Just say NO to socialism and to the corrupt, unionized, far left IRS, the gestapo of America's political class. After all, the federal government ignores millions of illegals who are breaking U.S. law every day. Our Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. All we have to do is just say no to a scheme we all know is un-American and a violation of our most basic founding fundamentals of privacy, self reliance, limited government and individual freedom.

It's not the incompetence of big government, it is the tyranny of unaccountable government ...and we do ourselves a massive injustice by muddling the two.

Nearly $700 million dollars went to a bundler for Obama's campaign, who helped to circumvent the credit card security system so that foreign, non-citizens could impact our free elections.

The entire process of installing Obamacare has been a fraud, based upon a pile of lies, to sustain a Ponzi scheme that fills the coffers of those who intend to destroy the free market.

It was posed as not a tax...the ONLY way it survived Supreme Court legal scrutiny was AS A TAX. It is, was, and always has been a punishing, brutalizing..."it's OUR TURN" payback...the "have nots" punishing the "haves".

Those who PAY taxes, being groped by TSA, humiliated, un-diapered grandmas and babies, "yo 401k and yo daddy's 401k and yo grand daddy's 401k" being seized, the Senate being dismantled, the House being ignored, the Supreme Court being circumvented...and packed with traitors to the Constitution.

EVERY protection, every freedom, every check and balance under direct assault. With our information stream turned into a Propaganda Shield to cover up and disguise and prevent truth from ever reaching the people.

The One World Socialists have stolen our protections, our liberty, our freedoms. Their media has actively conspired to aid and abet them. The Republican Party has treated this like a Girl Scout pillow fight.

The lack of rage defies comprehension. SOMEBODY has to organize the facts and articulate to the masses what is being done to them...and get the message out in spite of the Propaganda traitors.

Again, Obamacare is the first true bruise appearing on the body politic. The masses are "feeling" the effects of small c communism...they have no idea they have been infected with political AIDS. The lifeblood of this once great nation has sepsis of a virulent evil.

It is NOT incompetence...that's a symptom of radical leftism...not the disease. Tyranny, treason and treachery...the intent to destroy our protections and get "payback"...is the disease.

The overly ambitious ACA was impossible from the outset. Two academics and others played a role in its creation. Zeke Emmanual [Pen]and Gruber [MIT} and Berwick of some institution: academics and theory at the core.Running 2700 pages long and over 10,000 regulations was simply excessive.The problem to be solved has not been identified to this day. Allegedly it was to provide insurance for the 30 million who did not have insurance whether they wanted insurance or no.Consequently, the web problem is one of many problems. Overload to a system that is broken from the outset. If those who write legislation - lobbyists and conressional staff and think tanks - had to answer three questions, we might have better results.The three questions are: First, what is the problem to be solved specifically. Second how is the solution proposed attainable, and, third what percentage of the goal [question 1] can be measured specifically?This should require no more than 5-10 pages.If not, complexity will not guarantee satisfactory results. Thus we have Obamacare.The measureable part of Obamacare is: millions have lost their health insurance.

Most Obama supporters probably fall in the medicaid category and don't pay for much of anything anyway. Those who don't should vote, vote, vote and change our government back to something more AMERICAN. Some should stop nitpicking and try looking at the big picture.

A couple of observations: 1) one of the major reasons Commander Zero pushed back the opening of the 2014 exchange season to November 15 is precisely so the seniors don't see the bomb awaiting them; 2) the rates will be fixed by the end of April 2014 for the 2015 season because that is the law, not the 0 pays much attention; and, 3) by pushing back open season to mid-November some of the people whose insurance is about to be cancelled [mostly small/medium sized businesses] will not get the notice until after the election. Oh, and you can be very sure that Commander Zero will lean hard to the insurance companies to both not reveal the new rates until after the election and not to send out cancellation notices before then, either.

The fundamental dishonesty of ObamaCare is that the government can run health insurance/medical care more efficiently than private markets without government intervention, so that your health insurance will cost less (e.g, a $2,500 savings) and the cost of medical care will decrease (we'll bend the cost curve down). Both of these propositions are fundamental lies.

We are seeing that the vast majority of individual policyholders who are shopping (or trying to shop) on-line to replace their canceled policies are seeing HIGHER rates with HIGHER deductibles. The increase can be offset by subsidies for some buyers, but most who are not living at or below the poverty level won't qualify for subsidies.

We also can't provide more care for more people at a lower cost. We need to retain experienced people in the medical profession and attract younger Americans to go into the health care field. The ONLY way to do that - short of forced labor - is to offer financial incentives. This is particularly true for medical students who have piled up 7 or more years of staggering debt obtaining their education.

Only the private market can provide goods and services efficiently. Government intervention leads to less availability, poorer quality and higher cost. If there are 15% who are uninsured or unable to afford medical care, the best way to address that problem is through medical insurance/medical care vouchers to those people, so they can purchase policies or care. It is NOT through the federal government taking over 1/6 of the economy. The web site may get fixed but the fundamental flaw of socialized health care will always be with us.

Obama perpetrated fraud, a criminal offense. And it's on tape, thirty five times he repeated the "You can keep your plan" lie in speeches touting Obamacare. If he were a CEO of a private company he would now be in jail. At the very least, the Republicans should make an ATTEMPT to have him impeached. Doesn't matter that the attempt will fail. A bond will have been re-established with all the common shlubs that don't have any pull and would have been destroyed had they tried anything remotely like this massive naked fraud.

Although the DNC would like to go back to their goody bag of leftist tricks they won’t be able to superimpose the success of their 2012 three ringed circus on next year’s elections. For one thing the charge of racism is a spent bullet. So, it’s possible that the way they introduce their next Big Lie could be as significant as the lie itself.

"This is what happens when you put breathtaking incompetence together with patented progressive “whatever it takes” dishonesty. You get the Mother of All Failed Government Program Rollouts, the Mother of All Domestic Deceptions, and the Mother of All Presidential Failures, all in one petulant, defiant, punk package."

This is also what you get when you are So Busy "Making History," that you forget to look closely at exactly who you are "Making History" with!

True....how many First's did Obama punch? First African-American, gotcha. But also: first communist president, first Affirmative Action president, the most spectacularly unqualified president, first president likely elected in violation of the 14th amendment (requiring that both parents be citizens of the US but nowadays misinterpreted as simply being born on US soil - and even that is suspect with this president), first anti-American president, first president who does not even give lip service to American exceptionalism, first president who doesn't know how to negotiate...anything, first president with whom several people claim to have engaged in homosexual acts (not judging, just saying), first president to attempt to annex a quarter of the citizens of a internationally recognized foreign country, first president to abdicate foreign responsibilities to - ahem - France, first president to illegalize health insurance and instead require the purchase of health maintenance and abortion support plans, the list goes on.... am I missing anything?